Seven weeks of rain
from babbling brook the fluent fluids grew
to become an articulate river — liquid language
irrigating the dumb savannah
with flowing oratory.
Where nothing had grown now
each leaf a tongue or veined
page, a library of volumes took
root, birds conversing in the lexical
branches.
Dry tongues grew loose lapping the water
and stories flowed forth in unstaunchable
flood.

I had the idea this morning that, whatever we do, it might be interspersed with stand-up comedy routines. Funny peculiar / funny ha ha. E.g.:

ROUTINE No. 1

Peter : My earliest memory is of taking a walk with my parents on a winter day in Forest Park in St. Louis. I tied a carrot to a string to drag behind me to catch a rabbit. I was sure a rabbit would hop out of the woods to get the carrot and I could take it home as a pet. Throughout my childhood, I had dogs, cats, frogs, gerbils, mice and a duck. But no rabbit.

David: I had a pet carrot I used to take for walks on a lead. It was always getting attacked by rabbits.

As the scene opens, two Armchair Travellers: Bellini and Salomé, are seen sitting in thin air as if on armchairs. We are in a virtual world. The future. When people need a vacation from reality, they go to special theatres to “catch a COLD” as the saying goes. A COLD being an acronym for a Collective Oneiric Lucid Delay. They buy a ticket, and are ushered to seats in the dimness. Sounds of deep breathing, snores and the steady hiss of leaking gas. They sit back among their fellow passengers and allow themselves to be collectively gassed with Travelling Gas. Sleep. In this sleep the passengers “catch a COLD” as the saying, born of endless ad campaigns, goes. A COLD being an acronym for a Collective Oneiric Lucid Delay. (The Collective Oneirics Company, [CO Co.] is the vast entertainment conglomerate which provides the populace with escapism, offering a way out of the world into a single long continuous communal dream in which one “pays to play” a part, dreaming that one has free will in one’s role.) This is the virtual world we are in. It’s an oneiric soap opera and it has run for longer than The Archers. Bellini and Salomé are in it now. It’s evening. Bellini and Salomé have met at the neighbourhood bustop. (With other passengers coming home from work, Bellini has just stepped off a bus which we see behind him.) Salomé has been waiting to meet Salami, her husband. Bellini and his wife, Baloney, are their next-door neighbours. Bellini and Salami work at the same plant. Belini tells Salomé that Salami hadn’t been on the bus this evening. They duck behind a bush for privacy. Salomé blurts “Belly,” Bellini sobs “Sally,” and they fall into each other’s arms. They’re both very refined and classy. But they’re cheating, (Salomé on Salami, Bellini on Baloney), having an adulterous affair. Unbeknownst to them, of course, their respective spouses, Baloney and Salami are having one too. They are as coarse as Bellini and Salomé are refined. Salami tells Baloney “I wish I’d met you before I met Salomé. She doesn’t understand me. You and I have so much more in common!” And when Baloney tells Salami “all I have in common with Bellini is the assonance of our nomenclature.” Salami: “I feel the same way, Belly!” And they clinch. Cut to the other couple clinching.

I don’t know if you have art under way. We need something for the cafe oto page instead of the non-existent band photo which can double as a poster image as well.

Idea, if you’re still searching:

I have a preamble I use for various things. It goes like this:
They lied about the parallax view.
They said parallel lines don’t intersect
but they do.
Now I can see how the road is running out on me.

So the idea is Jack Kerouac in Wonderland from that picture of Alice in the hall of perspective where she comes up against the door down the hallway which isnt small because of perspective but because it’s small. Except obviously the parallel lines of the parallax road have come together, This is part of the Pharoah Eisenhower thing wherein the creator of vital technologies (interstate highway) enable the poets and creatives by providing a physical path to enlightenment.

This was an answer to a question from a newspaper reporter when Edison was working on the alkaline battery, btw – it took 10 years and 50,000 experiments. It cost him one million dollars of his own money for research, but he recovered his money from sales of the batteries.

The Project

The Archimedes Quartet is a project driven by method, mystery and miasma. Five years ago David Thomas described a bath tub epiphany to Peter Blegvad at a chance meeting outside an architectural college in Oxford. "Edison, Einstein, Eisenhower and Elvis - The Four 'E's Who Invented The 20th Century." This evolved, in the way of these sorts of conversations, into a Big Idea - a lecture / symposium slamdown to be refereed by Chris Cutler. A few emails were exchanged, words beginning with "E" were accumulated but, in the way of these things, the Big Idea withered on the vine.

Well, it's back and it's bigger than before and it's booked, Saturday, December 3 2011, at Cafe Oto, London.

Only trouble is we still got no idea at all what the Big Idea will look like except it will be musical and bag lunches are advised.

That's the downside. The upside is that Blegvad and Thomas are inventive story-tellers, of the tall tale variety, very cool singers, and, in spite of a mutually shared tendency to over intellectualize, they are shameless entertainers. Egged on by the flamboyant rhythm section of Chris Cutler and John Edwards a concert of "Eureka!" moments is envisioned.

This blog tracks the work-in-progress.

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